CHAPTER III
THE FOREIGN PRINCESS whom an ‘obviously excited’ Elizabeth, in company with her parents, greeted on the platform of Ballater station on 17 September 1934 was Marina of Greece. Round and round on the red carpet the lively Elizabeth danced, ‘until Princess Marina... stooped down to kiss her future niece’.1 A cousin of Greece’s deposed King George II, Marina was newly engaged to the youngest of Bertie’s brothers, George, Duke of Kent. Seven years earlier, her haughty and ambitious mother, the former Grand Duchess Helen Vladimirovna, a granddaughter of Tsar Alexander II, had experienced fleeting excitement at the attentiveness towards her youngest daughter of the Prince of Wales. Nothing came of it. David’s affections returned to the familiar embrace of his married mistress Freda Dudley Ward; he turned his back on Marina as he had any number of ‘suitable’ brides.
Alone in the family party gathered that autumn at Balmoral to welcome Marina and her parents, Elizabeth and Margaret were unaware of the ‘problem’ of Uncle David. As early as November 1924, the King had described his eldest son feelingly as ‘very obstinate’.2 Over the ensuing decade, exasperation had hardened into something more: the half fear, half conviction he communicated to his second son and daughter-in-law that David, who readily admitted his boredom with ‘Princing’, would never succeed to the throne. Time would prove George V nearly right. The working out of this royal prophecy was painful and dramatic, and changed the lives of many members of David’s family, Elizabeth’s most of all.
For his part David felt no regret over Marina’s marriage to George. ‘You know my views on “Royal Marriages”,’ he wrote to a friend; he described their courtship as ‘so d – – d quick that one wonders how long it will last’.3 Instead, on 29 November, with Bertie, he accompanied bridegroom George to Westminster Abbey. There the congregation included ‘a very unattractive and common Englishman’, Ernest Simpson, and his wife Wallis, ‘an American 150 per cent’, ‘a jolly, plain, intelligent, quiet, unpretentious and unprepossessing little woman... [who had] already the air of a personage who walks into a room as though she almost expected to be curtsied to’.4 This twice-married uber-American was, of course, David’s latest mistress.
For Elizabeth, her own role as bridesmaid made the two royal weddings of the following year memorable. Marina’s bevy of attendants included a clutch of grown-up European princesses, all, bar Juliana of the Netherlands, flotsam of vanished thrones. Elizabeth and her second cousin Lady Mary Cambridge, a great-niece of Queen Mary’s, carried Marina’s silver-lined train. They wore white tulle frocks of the sort Elizabeth wore for parties and photographic sittings. For May Cambridge’s wedding three years earlier, Elizabeth had worn her first long dress. To mark the occasion she sat for ‘pottery artist’ Phyllis Simpson for a six-inch-high ceramic sculpture commissioned by her parents.5 On this later occasion her appearance did not excite the same degree of popular interest. Instead attention focused on Elizabeth’s behaviour. Reviewing Marina’s attendants, newspapers described Elizabeth approvingly as ‘the most... earnest of them all’, serious in her duties at the wedding rehearsal at Buckingham Palace as well as the service itself.6 Her behaviour underlined again the age difference between Elizabeth and Margaret. Sitting with her parents, Margaret once ‘endeavoured to exchange a sisterly greeting. She raised a little hand in front of her face and twiddled her fingers at Princess Elizabeth. Princess Elizabeth, however, was as dignified as anyone taking part in that ceremony of majesty and pomp, and she raised her eyebrows in a silent rebuke.’7 Already each sister played her allotted role, Margaret puckish and spontaneous in her mischief, Elizabeth serious and precociously mature. Commendations of her earnestness and dignity – to modern ears, questionable virtues in an eight-year-old – inevitably shaped Elizabeth’s understanding of appropriately ‘royal’ behaviour. The ‘silent rebuke’ would become a characteristic expression of disapproval.
Eleven months later, on 6 November 1935, Elizabeth was again a bridesmaid. The occasion was the marriage of Bertie’s middle brother, Henry, Duke of Gloucester, to Lady Alice Montagu-Douglas-Scott, like the Duchess of York the daughter of a Scottish nobleman. Five-year-old Margaret joined her sister. Both were dressed for the first time by Norman Hartnell, who later designed the sisters’ dresses for their parents’ coronation, both their wedding dresses and Elizabeth’s own coronation gown. Hartnell envisaged long dresses ‘of a sophisticated Empire style’; he was foiled by the King’s desire to see his granddaughters’ ‘pretty little knees’. Vain was his protest that ‘they’ll look like bloody little fairies’:8 a fairy-like appearance had been the duchess’s aim since her daughters’ birth. Fairies were prominent in the cultural diet of inter-war nurseries: in stories and poems, in the watercolours of Margaret Tarrant, like that in the day nursery at 145 Piccadilly. Elizabeth’s Christmas present to Queen Mary in 1933 was her own painting of fairies; a gift of a woollen quilt to Elizabeth in January 1935 from 11,000 Australian girls also called Elizabeth was accompanied by a book ‘decorated with drawings of native flowers and trees, with fairies and animals playing amongst them’, including a picture of ‘tiny sheep with fairies shearing them and busily sorting out the fleece’.9 Fairies were dainty, sometimes whimsical, sometimes roguish, typical of the neverland of childish innocence: to enjoy and resemble fairies was proof of Elizabeth’s wholesomeness. In fairy guise, she was photographed by Marcus Adams at the time of each wedding. A picture from November 1934 proved among Adams’s most successful. It confirms the opinion of diplomat Miles Lampson, meeting Elizabeth at Balmoral in September, that he had ‘seldom seen such an enchanting child as Princess Elizabeth’, and the view of scullery maid Mollie Moran, who, from the upper deck of a bus in Park Lane, glimpsed both princesses playing in their parents’ garden and ‘stared, quite spellbound, at their pretty, peaches-and-cream complexions framed by soft fair curls’.10 Resting her face on her left hand and leaning on a plump cushion, Adams’s Elizabeth regards the viewer levelly. Her direct gaze suggests something of the fixity and coolness of appraisal observers would increasingly note. It is an image of self-assurance and possibly self-containment. Both were qualities repeatedly attributed to Elizabeth in the years ahead.
The government’s decision to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of George V’s accession in the form of a silver jubilee, the first commemoration of its sort in British history, made 1935 significant in the life of the royal family. During the celebrations themselves, Elizabeth was frequently at her grandparents’ side. At first hand she experienced what the King called ‘this personal link between me and my people’, ‘a spontaneous offering of loyalty – and... of love’:11 events and responses that cannot fail to have made a lasting impression on a serious-minded and observant child aware from infancy that her grandparents were also her sovereigns, their family life a focus of widespread interest.
In January, Elizabeth returned in kind the gift to her of a cake from the ‘poor children of Battersea’ at the time of her christening: she iced and decorated a cake for the boys of the Juvenile Instruction Centre, in the town of Blaina, South Wales.12 Weeks later, following a visit by her father to its factory in New Southgate, she and Margaret were given their own telephones by the Standard Telephones and Cables company: ‘ivory and gold-plated... two full-size instruments, each complete with a dial’ and fully functional.13 Here were two facets of royal life: the unearned tributes of high status and consideration for those less fortunate, increasingly identified as the grounds for such tributes. At eight and a half, Elizabeth did not recognize the two gestures as such. She would demonstrate convincingly over a long life her understanding of the ‘contract’ between royal family and people.
On 1 March a BBC official revealed that the corporation ‘should very much welcome the opportunity of broadcasting the voice of the Princess to the children’.14 It was the first time jubilee preparations focused on Elizabeth. ‘It has been felt that special consideration might be given to the children in order to give them an interest all their own in the jubilee celebrations,’ one newspaper explained.15 But the idea of a jubilee broadcast by Elizabeth in a special edition of Children’s Hour was not pursued, failing to win the sanction either of her parents or grandparents.
The suggestion nevertheless revealed Elizabeth’s prominence. Just as Canadians had chosen Elizabeth to appear on a commemorative Silver Jubilee one cent stamp, it was Elizabeth whom the BBC identified as the royal grandchild to engage the interest of children nationwide. Elizabeth was most closely associated with her grandfather of any of the King’s grandchildren: his chosen companion during his seaside convalescence, a frequent visitor to Windsor Castle. That spring, for the first time, she had been present when the King distributed the Royal Maundy Money in Westminster Abbey; she was reported to have ‘caught her grandfather’s enthusiasm and has started a stamp collection of her own’, to which the King contributed. On 6 May, after the thanksgiving service at St Paul’s Cathedral, Elizabeth stood between her grandparents on the balcony of Buckingham Palace to hear the cheers of a quarter of a million people. The Yorks’ carriage had been first in the royal procession. Dressed like her sister in pale pink, ‘Princess Elizabeth, serene and self-possessed, waved to the crowds with her tiny white-gloved hand’, acknowledging what MP Chips Channon called ‘thunderous applause’.16 The bright sunshine, huge crowds, flags and fluttering decorations moved many that day to patriotic euphoria: one spectator described Elizabeth and Margaret as ‘a delightful picture of English childhood’.17 Inside St Paul’s, Elizabeth may or may not have watched proceedings with ‘her eyes wide with wonder’. Nor could she possibly have committed to memory the Archbishop of Canterbury’s encomium. But the prelate’s view of George V commanding the ‘respect and trust’ of his countrymen, his ‘quiet dignity worthy of his high office’ and his ‘unselfish dedication to [the nation’s] service’ expounded a formula of monarchy that set the pattern for Elizabeth’s father’s reign and indeed her own. A week later, the King and Queen made a surprise visit to the East End. Accompanying them on their journey through London’s poorest districts was their elder granddaughter. ‘Everywhere in the narrow streets, through which news of their coming spread like wildfire, the King and Queen and little Princess were greeted with a wholehearted demonstration of affection unsurpassed in any quarter.’18 More than once, the density of the throng brought the royal car to a standstill; crowds swarmed round it; men, women and children attempted to jump on to the running boards ‘cheering and waving wildly’. The royal couple were moved but not alarmed. For Elizabeth it was an extraordinarily powerful demonstration, proof of a very personal dimension to the bonds of crown and country. Along the shabby flag- and bunting-strung streets rippled the loyalty on which thrones depend, a loyalty in the first instance not to the institution of monarchy but her grandparents personally.
The morning after her drive to the East End, the Court Circular recorded simply, ‘Princess Elizabeth of York visited their Majesties and remained to luncheon.’ Accurately newspapers described the relationship of king and princess as that of ‘joyous friends’.19 It was a claim none of George V’s children could have made. In his diary that summer, the King wrote simply, ‘All the children looked so nice, but none prettier than Lilibet and Margaret.’20 To mark the occasion he gave both princesses pearl necklaces: three rows for Elizabeth, two for Margaret.
For George V, the events of that sun-drenched May proved a swansong. In June he developed bronchial catarrh. A fortnight’s unscheduled recuperation at Sandringham restored him to temporary health; he resumed the annual itinerary of Cowes Week, then Balmoral. In Scotland his guests included the Archbishop of Canterbury, to whom he talked ‘a great deal about “this latest friendship of the Prince of Wales” [with Wallis Simpson], and was very concerned about it’.21
The Yorks remained in London or at Royal Lodge. In July, a Punch and Judy show in the grounds of Mount Clare in Roehampton provided Elizabeth and Margaret with a moment of unalloyed childish fun to offset earlier formalities. In late summer, they travelled north to Birkhall, the house on the Balmoral estate, still lit by oil lamps and heated by paraffin stoves, which the King had loaned them since 1929. Neither of her parents fully explained to Elizabeth her grandfather’s worsening condition. Among treats was a birthday party at nearby Abergeldie Castle. It was given by the Earl and Countess of Shaftesbury for their granddaughter, Mary Anna Sturt. Despite a potentially inhibiting audience of the Queen, the duchess and the King of Greece, a children’s entertainer called Mr A. Hay Prestowe performed magic tricks and ventriloquism. He invited Elizabeth to help him. Her debut as a magician saw her perform, inevitably, ‘as to the manner born’.22 In London at the end of November, she accompanied her parents to a matinée in aid of the National Theatre Appeal, three hours of scenes from Shakespeare; her parents took her away before the beginning of the murder scene from Othello. Her favourite moment was a slapstick performance by music hall comedian George Robey of a soliloquy from Henry V. Like her enjoyment of the Punch and Judy show, it was proof that, precocious dignity and earnestness aside, she was still a child, with a child’s instincts and tastes.
At Christmas 1935, after a present-buying expedition to Woolworths (‘china ornaments, sweets and pages of coloured stick-on scraps and transfers’),23 Elizabeth and Margaret went to Sandringham without their parents. The duchess was suffering from pneumonia; she and the duke remained at Royal Lodge. The duchess wrote to her elder daughter. Her warning to be ‘very polite to everybody. Mind you answer very nicely when you are asked questions, even though they may be silly ones!’ is a reminder of the formality of the royal house party and the importance attached to good manners.24 As in other years, the sisters helped their grandparents distribute presents to estate workers, this year dressed in the ‘fairy’ frocks they had worn for the Gloucesters’ wedding. With the family party they listened to the King’s Christmas broadcast, his description of the Empire’s ‘family of peoples’ and his hopes for ‘the blessing of peace’; they were too young to understand the old King’s anxiety over Mussolini and Hitler. In the New Year, unable any longer to shoot, the King took sedate rides on his shooting pony instead. ‘Out of the mist came the King, mounted on his white pony, Jock,’ remembered a former member of the household, of a wintry, post-Christmas afternoon. ‘Walking by the head of the pony as if leading it along was the little figure of Princess Elizabeth. She was taking her grandfather back to the house.’25 Once before, at the seaside near Bognor, Elizabeth had cheered the King’s recovery. There would be no getting better this time. The King’s heart was weakening, he was short of breath, he walked with difficulty and struggled to remain awake. Perhaps, then, knowing, as he told old friends, that he was done for, he drew comfort from the small girl who accompanied his walks and saw him safely home. His estimate of her abilities was of the highest. He told Lady Algernon Gordon Lennox, ‘I pray to God that my eldest son will never marry and have children, and that nothing will come between Bertie and Lilibet and the throne.’26 For a man so conventional in outlook, with a conventional view of monarchy, such an irregular sentiment points to the despondency the Prince of Wales inspired in him.
Elizabeth sturdily rebuffed the efforts of the Archbishop of Canterbury to talk to her alone. In response to an invitation to accompany him on a walk, she asked him ‘not [to] tell me anything more about God. I know all about him already.’27 More appealing than the company of the elderly Lang was her snowman-building with Margaret on 17 January, or, the following morning, when ‘in the spring-like sunshine, warmly clad, they romped in the snow, laughingly bombarding’ their handiwork.28 It was proof of Queen Mary’s success in keeping up appearances that Elizabeth did not suspect the imminence of her grandfather’s death: the first bulletin announcing the King’s worsening condition was issued within hours of the princesses’ snowman-building. Both girls were informed the next morning. They left Sandringham for London by train that afternoon, dressed in cherry-red coats and hats, Elizabeth unable to disguise her unhappiness.29 Two days later, the King was dead. A lethal injection of cocaine and morphia into the jugular vein, administered by his doctor, hastened his end. It was a question of timing: his family’s preference that first reports of his death not appear in the evening papers, with their jaunty raffishness, but the sober pages of the Times. Elizabeth and Margaret were told after breakfast. Later in the day, Uncle David, Prince of Wales no longer, announced his intention of reigning as Edward VIII. He had chosen the same name as his grandfather, Edward VII, whose easy philandering had long been among his fixations.
Three weeks after George V’s death, nine-year-old Kinara Kestyn from Derby received a letter from the Duchess of York’s lady-in-waiting, Lettice Bowlby. ‘I am desired by Her Royal Highness the Duchess of York to thank you very much for your kind letter of sympathy to Princess Elizabeth,’ it ran. ‘You will understand what it means to her, as she adored her grandfather.’30
The King’s death was a watershed for all the Yorks save five-year-old Margaret, who was insulated by infancy. ‘My life has been so bound up with yours the last twelve years,’ the duchess wrote to Queen Mary.31 For eleven of those twelve years she had been the King and Queen’s only daughter-in-law, with an adroitness in managing that exacting couple that none of their own children possessed, and a privileged position at court. The births of Elizabeth, then Margaret, had strengthened this closeness. But while the duchess measured the King and Queen against the benchmark of her own parents and found them lacking, the King at times all but tyrannical as paterfamilias and, to his sons, ‘not understanding and helpful’, Elizabeth felt no such reservations about ‘Old Man Kind’. She shared his love of horses, stamps and the Highlands; she would come to share his feeling for religion, ‘impressive and appealing in its earnest simplicity’;32 grandfather and granddaughter shared a simple bond of affection. They had reputedly made an arrangement: every morning, at an agreed time, at the nursery window of 145 Piccadilly Elizabeth waved a white handkerchief in the direction of Buckingham Palace, where her grandfather also stood beside a window, watching for her greeting.33
By telegram, the duchess recalled Crawfie early to Royal Lodge from her Christmas holiday. Absent at the moment of the governess’s return, she left her a message: a request that she not allow events to ‘depress [Elizabeth and Margaret] more than is absolutely necessary... They are so young.’34 Her kind intentions mistook the extent of Elizabeth’s unhappiness. Elizabeth, Crawfie noted, ‘in her sensitive fashion felt it all deeply’.35 She was not to be hoodwinked from her grief. Even the toy horses provided faltering respite. ‘I remember her pausing doubtfully as she groomed one... and looking up at me for a moment. “Oh, Crawfie... ought we to play?” she asked.’36
Elizabeth took part in a number of the King’s obsequies, including the lying-in-state in Westminster Hall. Newspapers suggested ‘it was Queen Mary’s special wish’: the widow kept her black-clad granddaughter at her side throughout a late-night vigil. ‘The little princess gazed gravely on the bier and the statuesque groups of sentinels drawn from the Gentlemen-at-Arms, the Yeomen of the Guard and the Household Brigade of Guards.’ The royal party were present for a changing of the guard, ‘which the Queen also desired her granddaughter to watch’: Guards officers’ replacement by the dead king’s four sons, the so-called ‘vigil of the princes’.37 Queen Mary explained to Elizabeth the significance of the lying-in-state and details of the regalia round the coffin. Elizabeth’s presence was interpreted as a sign of the Queen’s particular fondness, but the Queen’s motives were mixed. The ceremonial of royal death represented history in the making. For the child now second in the line of succession, royal history, in her grandmother’s view, was particularly her business. Elizabeth did not look for explanations of her grandmother’s favour; her abiding impression was of Uncle David’s stillness throughout the brothers’ vigil and the overwhelming silence in the ancient building, as if, she said, ‘the King were asleep’.38
To Paddington station, on 28 January, Crawfie took the nine-year-old princess to await the arrival of the gun carriage en route for burial at Windsor. In this gloomy, vaulted enclosure, ‘packed with silent and often weeping people’, Elizabeth struggled. She was ‘very white... her small face quivered’. ‘She did not much like all this,’ Crawfie remembered, ‘but she meant to go through with it, making no fuss.’39 How often in the future would she act in just this way, this child raised in a world in which reserve and self-control were synonyms for good behaviour. But she would outlive that world. Sixty years later, following the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, the reserve Elizabeth learned in childhood, the instinct to eschew fuss, was seized upon by hostile crowds and an opportunist media as a cudgel with which to beat her most unkindly.
In the aftermath of the King’s death, the Yorks continued to shelter Elizabeth from speculation about her future. Given Edward VIII’s bachelorhood, such speculation was inevitable. The day after the funeral, the Tatler reproduced a full-page image of Elizabeth in her bridesmaid’s frock from the Gloucesters’ wedding. The magazine reminded readers that Elizabeth had taken another step closer to the throne; it indicated her fitness for the high office that might one day be hers. ‘The delightful and beloved little lady,’ it informed readers, ‘as elder daughter of the Heir Presumptive to the Throne, is now second in the order of succession. Already an outstanding personality, Princess Elizabeth possesses a discernment remarkable in one so young, and her thoughtfulness for others is unfailing.’40 That she was widely beloved was indeed the case. Overlooking the new king, whose film-star charisma inspired adulation, the Sphere told readers that ‘of the Royal Family Princess Elizabeth probably commands the largest following of ardent “fans”’.41 It was a verdict unlikely to recommend itself to the duke and duchess, to Crawfie, anxious to invest both sisters’ upbringing with normality, or to the protective Alah. Nor did the duke and duchess comment on the visual symbolism of Frank Salisbury’s official painting of the Silver Jubilee thanksgiving service when it was unveiled that spring. In Salisbury’s processional image, only two members of the royal family directly regard the viewer: a querulous Prince of Wales and, behind him, his heir in the next generation, his niece Princess Elizabeth.
Too young to reflect on its larger implications, Elizabeth could not escape the short-term impact of George V’s death. Even her wardrobe changed. In place of the cherry-red coat she had worn for snowballing at Sandringham was a new coat of grey flannel; she was fitted for linen summer frocks in mauve and white.42 As ever, Margaret’s clothes were the same. So were Mary Cambridge’s: her new grey coat was ‘cut on military lines, double breasted’, to be worn with a matching grey beret. The princesses’ mauve and white frocks were a concession, albeit drab enough compared with the flower-patterned cotton piqués the duchess usually chose: Queen Mary had ‘expressed a wish that all the Royal children should wear light, half-mourning colours by Easter’.43 Accompanying her parents on an engagement weeks later, Elizabeth wore a grey tweed coat with a mauve straw hat.
Before Easter 1936, however, came an escape from court mourning. At the beginning of March, the duke and duchess travelled to Eastbourne on the south coast and a month’s recuperation for the duchess. Although Queen Mary had let it be known that, in her grief, ‘her greatest joy... [was] the company of her granddaughters’, Elizabeth and Margaret shortly joined their parents.44 Their visits to the seaside were infrequent; at Eastbourne that spring, weather ‘which would have done justice to June’ and a beach chalet of their own gilded the lily.45 The duchess complained about the crowds that dogged every excursion. To Queen Mary she wrote protestingly, ‘Yesterday was divine, and in the morning we went down to the little “chalet” on the beach, and the sun was heavenly. The people were rather a bore, and though they stared quite politely, they stared & STARED.’46 It was the princesses, not their parents, they wanted to see. The parish church was full for their first Sunday visit on 8 March, ‘and outside the church the crowds increased in size when it was known that the Princesses had joined their parents at the service’.47 A year before, watching the princesses playing in Hamilton Gardens from a passing bus, scullery maid Mollie Moran had described them as ‘seemingly oblivious to the attention’;48 Lady Astor’s niece Joyce Grenfell described them at a children’s party as ‘natural... always being watched and concentrated on’.49 Obliviousness eluded the duchess. She arranged drives into the surrounding country, including to Winchelsea, where the rector showed Elizabeth the church. They went to Cooden Beach, ‘& the children enjoyed themselves enormously’, and to Beachy Head. Sometimes their route was lined with wellwishers. In the privacy of Compton Place, loaned to them by the Duke of Devonshire, the duchess settled her daughters into the carefree routines that had always been her priority, the prying world shut out.
She could not shield either Elizabeth or Margaret from overwhelming public attention, but she did succeed in concealing her own unhappiness at what she termed ‘the effects of a family break-up’ following the King’s death, and in preserving unspoiled aspects of their childishness.50 At the end of May, Elizabeth went with her parents, her grandmother, the King and a party that also included Prince George and Princess Marina, the Duke and Duchess of Kent, to visit the Queen Mary ahead of its maiden voyage from Southampton. ‘Madly keen’ to see the ship, Elizabeth so enjoyed her tour, including the engine room and the kitchens, that she forgot her tea; she spent an hour in the liner’s nursery. Her ‘inspection’ was more than cursory; it suggests the ‘sheer delight’ observers attributed to her. ‘She sampled all the toys, went down the slide, used the toy telephones, played the little piano and then, noticing the cinema, asked if she could see a film. A Mickey Mouse cartoon was shown for her, and the rest of the royal party stayed with her to watch it.’51 At the visit’s close, Queen Mary asked Elizabeth to pick a souvenir. She chose a blue velvet sailor doll with the ship’s name on its cap band.52 Later in the year, in a toy shop in Dundee, both Elizabeth and Margaret were delighted to be given balloons by the shop’s owner.53 Material privilege and public lionizing had not yet spoiled either sister.
In June, the Yorks were photographed with corgis Dookie and Jane, Choo-Choo the Tibetan lion dog and the duke’s labradors Mimsy, Stiffy and Scrummy, at Royal Lodge and in front of Y Bwthyn Bach, for a book published at the end of the year entitled Our Princesses and Their Dogs. With marked informality photographer Lisa Sheridan captured the family of four off duty at home. Here were images that spoke powerfully to their contemporaries: father, mother and children, each playing parts designated by convention, happy together and with their dogs. In one of Sheridan’s best-known images, Elizabeth hugs an obliging corgi, her head resting on the dog’s. Her expression is of contentment. Viewers might have labelled it, like the princesses’ appearance the previous summer, another ‘delightful picture of English childhood’. Later, Lisa Sheridan’s memories of their first encounter included Elizabeth’s marked reserve. For Crawfie, it was a trait she had inherited from her father.54
That summer, pictures on show at the Royal Academy included Edmond Brock’s group portrait Her Royal Highness the Duchess of York and Her Children Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret Rose. It was the fulfilment of a commission initiated three years earlier, when the duchess had written to the artist about ‘a family picture of myself and our two daughters... if you would paint us all, it would be a delicious picture I know’.55 Brock enjoyed the patronage of the Marchioness of Londonderry, a formidable political hostess of the Yorks’ acquaintance, and had twice painted their youngest daughter, Elizabeth’s friend Mairi Vane-Tempest-Stewart. Informal and affectionate, his York triple portrait is nevertheless a study in the grand manner. Less widely publicized than Sheridan’s photographs, it is a reminder that, despite their public ‘ordinariness’, the Yorks inhabited a cultural milieu that was decidedly patrician.
In 1936, the question of whether Wallis Simpson provided Edward VIII with a reason or a pretext for abdication was unimportant in the life of Princess Elizabeth of York. More significant, alongside tectonic shifts within the royal family, was the light in which Elizabeth’s grandmother and her mother chose to interpret the King’s actions and the implications of their interpretation. Of George V, Nancy Astor had written to an exiled Russian grand duchess in January, ‘He was really beloved for there never was a man who did his duty better’;56 an essay written by a fifteen-year-old schoolboy reasoned that ‘he was popular with all classes because when he did a thing it was in the service of England’.57 By contrast, the actions of his eldest son were widely condemned, including within the royal family, as a dereliction of duty, a sentiment Virginia Woolf discerned in letters to The Times: ‘Our sons & brothers gave their wives & lovers & also their lives for the country. And can’t the King even do this – ?’58 The abdication threatened the stability of the crown and the unity of the country; at a critical moment in European affairs, it distracted the British from a full appreciation of the threat of Nazi Germany; and it altered royal lives for ever, Bertie’s and his daughter Elizabeth’s most of all. It became the Windsors’ cautionary tale, the ex-king the dynasty’s bogeyman; its narrative was of private inclination overwhelming public duty. The simplest explanation for Edward’s actions was his preference for Wallis Simpson over lonely kingship. Officially the King chose love in place of sovereignty. His choice, stigmatized by Archbishop Lang as ‘a craving for private happiness’, cast a lasting shadow over Elizabeth’s life and stamped indelibly her view of royalty’s obligations.59 Within Elizabeth’s family, his choice demonized self-gratification. It confirmed this starchy family’s fear of unchecked emotions. It also damned Mrs Simpson.
The abdication forced on Edward VIII by the actions of his prime minister, Stanley Baldwin, who consistently opposed marriage between the King and Mrs Simpson, and the hostility of dominion premiers and swathes of the press also highlighted the indivisibility for royalty of their public and private selves. The King was king at all times and in every aspect of his life. Given his position as supreme governor of a church that did not recognize divorce, his choice of life partner was potentially as trammelled as any other of his actions. Indeed all his choices were apparently circumscribed, any real power he possessed a will-o’-the-wisp without the bolstering of public endorsement and officialdom. At the eleventh hour, the King hell-bent on modernizing his father’s ‘Victorian’ court, fell hostage to popular conceptions of royalty. As Woolf recorded, ‘We can’t have a woman Simpson for Queen, that was the sense of it. She’s no more royal than you or me, was what the grocer’s young woman said.’60 From her elders, notably her grandmother, who, according to Osbert Sitwell, ‘saw the world’s moral and social problems in terms of black and white, with no gradation’, Elizabeth absorbed the ‘lessons’ of the abdication.61 Whenever she became aware of them, she did not allow herself to forget. Monarchy’s fragility had been exposed to sneering view. How flimsy in the face of personal whim magic and mystique had proven.
A month after George V’s death, the Yorkshire Evening Post had informed its readers ‘it is merely a coincidence that [Princess Elizabeth] has not seen her uncle, the new King, since his accession’.62 Like other similar apologia, it fell wide of the mark. Mrs Simpson was the chief cause of strain in relations between the Yorks and Elizabeth’s favourite uncle that lessened their time spent together; the duchess’s antipathy pre-dated her brother-in-law’s accession. It did not diminish over time. Discussing ‘a certain person’ in a letter to Queen Mary, the duchess claimed, ‘I do not feel that I can make advances to her & ask her to our house, as I imagine would be liked, & this fact is bound to make relations a little difficult.’63 To her mother-in-law the duchess did not need to explain further. From inception the King’s relationship with Mrs Simpson had caused his parents dismay. In 1936 the unsuitability as royal consort of an American divorcee who would shortly have two living ex-husbands required no enumeration. The magpie-like Queen could not have made her disapprobation clearer than in a symbolic act of omission. Early in 1936, she divided up jewellery from the collection of George V’s unmarried sister, Princess Victoria: pieces to the duchesses of York, Kent and Gloucester. To the new King, ‘who might pass them on to Mrs Simpson’, she gave nothing.64
Over the course of the year, Crawfie remembered, there were ‘fewer occasions when [the King] dropped in for a romp with his nieces’,65 grounds for Princess Margaret – four years younger than her sister and with fewer memories before this date – telling biographer Christopher Warwick in 1981 that the closeness between Edward and the York princesses was apocryphal: ‘We didn’t know him.’66 Unusually, the King was absent from Elizabeth’s birthday tea party in April: when she cut her cake, she set aside a slice to be sent to him. He did, however, arrive at Royal Lodge the same evening with his present of a riding whip. Less happily he made an afternoon visit to Royal Lodge to show off a new American station wagon, taking with him a party that included Mrs Simpson. Whatever the declared purpose of that visit, it was Mrs Simpson who was scrutinized most closely by the duchess and Crawfie. ‘I left with the distinct impression that while the Duke of York was sold on the American station wagon, the duchess was not sold on David’s other American interest,’ she wrote, and the visit, Crawfie noted, was never afterwards mentioned by her employers or the children.67 Elizabeth saw the King again on her visit to the Queen Mary at the end of May. Although not reported, she was not alone in trying out the slide in the liner’s nursery: her uncle tried it, too. Of course, Elizabeth remained unaware of royal concerns about Mrs Simpson’s hold on the King, described that month as her ‘absolute slave’.68
The autumn was to prove ‘rather uneasy’ for the adults in Elizabeth’s life: Crawfie described it as an interlude of ‘nervous tension’.69 Metaphorically impermeable, the nursery walls immured Elizabeth from many warning signs. Her days retained their familiar pattern: the lightest timetable of lessons with Crawfie, twin-like playtime with Margaret, the familiar jockeyings with their parents, riding lessons, singing lessons, dancing classes. The foreign press made whoopee, agog at the King’s relationship with his Baltimore broad; at home, newspapers kept a fragile silence. Court officials fulminated at the new King’s shortcomings, his laziness, carelessness over state papers, calculated rudenesses. Already key players favoured his father’s solution of the crown for Bertie, then Elizabeth. To Birkhall the duchess invited the Archbishop of Canterbury, repository of George V’s anxieties. Approvingly the churchman watched Elizabeth at play with her sister and cousin, Margaret Elphinstone. ‘They sang action songs most charmingly,’ he recorded. ‘It was strange to think of the destiny which may be awaiting the little Elizabeth, at present second from the throne. She and her lively little sister are certainly most entrancing children.’70 In the event, Lang played no part in the abdication process, despite his partisanship behind the scenes and the newspaper seller reported by Chips Channon whose abdication day cry was ‘The Church held a pistol to [the King’s] head’.71 Privately and publicly he championed Elizabeth’s parents.
Elizabeth was still a little girl preoccupied by ponies. Towards her friends she displayed a tendency to bossiness, to her sister a strong protective instinct; she showed no interest at all in her clothes, save a favourite sapphire-blue velvet opera cloak. In Crawfie’s descriptions she was still ‘very farm-minded’ and attached to her toy farm of animals bought from Woolworths, still the earnest, eager girl who had told her governess, ‘If I am ever Queen I shall make a law that there must be no riding on Sundays. Horses should have a rest too.’72 At the Royal Tournament, an annual highlight of horses and soldiers, she and Margaret ‘sat forward, leaning on their elbows, watching every move’.73 Photographs show Elizabeth standing at the front of the royal box: she clapped, she rocked with laughter, she was ‘enthralled’, ‘delighted’. Crawfie was enlisted to join in pony games at home: ridden or driven by the princess, a string of Woolworth’s pearls as reins. Elizabeth herself was a pony; she pawed the ground with a brogue-clad ‘hoof’, she snorted and whinnied; as a pony she ignored any questions asked her. In the evening, she and Margaret groomed the nursery’s toy horses; they polished and cleaned immaculate tack. At length she quoted Henry Owen, the groom; she marvelled at his prowess. She felt keenly Ginger’s mistreatment in Black Beauty. Horses dominated her memories of the Kents’ wedding: ‘she said that she could not bear to see the way the horses’ manes had been tied up, nor the tightness of their bearing reins’.74 In Scotland in September, riding alternated with tree climbing and learning to make pastry with Mrs McDonald, Birkhall’s housekeeper. Elphinstone cousins came to stay. Horse games filled the long days, Elizabeth their instigator. ‘We endlessly cavorted as horses,’ remembered Margaret Elphinstone. ‘We galloped round and round. We were horses of every kind: carthorses, racehorses and circus horses. We spent a lot of time as circus horses and it was obligatory to neigh.’75 There were also picnics on an island in the River Muick, with competitions to eat as much brown bread and golden syrup as possible. When it rained the cousins played indoors, in a single-room annexe, rain drumming on the metal roof.76
Even as the King’s reign entered its final febrile weeks, little altered in the routines of the nursery floor at 145 Piccadilly or at Royal Lodge. Elizabeth and Margaret loaned dolls to a forthcoming exhibition at Whiteley’s department store in aid of Sunshine Homes for Blind Babies. Both were again knitting scarves for the annual clothing appeal organized by Queen Mary’s Needlework Guild, and Elizabeth was busy making her grandmother’s Christmas present: a linocut of a drawing she had already finished of a circus horse standing on its hind legs in the centre of the ring. Evolving plans for the coronation, scheduled for 12 May 1937, designated a role for Elizabeth but excluded Margaret: the lengthy ceremony was considered ‘a too big demand upon the patience of the little Princess’.77 Reports asserted then denied that Elizabeth would travel to Holland in January as a bridesmaid to Princess Juliana, her fellow bridesmaid at the Kent wedding two years earlier. More dramatic though less widely circulated was a rumour that Queen Mary had agreed to act as regent for her granddaughter.78 On 17 November, David told the duke and Queen Mary of his resolution to abdicate in the event of being unable to marry Mrs Simpson. Three days later, a dazed Duke and Duchess of York left London for Wiltshire and a shooting weekend with Lord and Lady Pembroke at Wilton House, as ever leaving their daughters behind.
Stop-start discussions with the King and the pall cast by the increasing likelihood of the duke’s own accession in David’s place imposed an almost intolerable strain on Elizabeth’s parents. The duchess lamented the horror of ‘having to talk & behave as if nothing was wrong during these difficult days’, but did just this: in public, in letters to her mother, at home.79 That her daughters should be safeguarded from every shadow remained a primary concern. Looking back in 1950, Crawfie suggested, ‘I do not know what we would have done at that time without the swimming lessons... The outings to the swimming club were the high spots of the week... and they helped a lot to take our minds off the clouds that were gathering about us all.’80 Elizabeth knew little, and understood less, of the gathering clouds. Until the British press broke its silence on 3 December and billboards broadcast the King’s dilemma, it is possible that her only warnings of things amiss were the haggardness of her father’s appearance and, presumably, an atmosphere of something unspoken; at the eleventh hour the duchess again fell ill with influenza, her reaction more than once to unpleasantness. By early December both princesses had begun to notice the frequent comings and goings at 145 Piccadilly. To a question of Margaret’s Elizabeth replied confusedly, ‘I think Uncle David wants to marry Mrs Baldwin, and Mr Baldwin doesn’t like it.’81 (Another version has Margaret asking Elizabeth in the procession at her parents’ coronation, ‘Shall we see Uncle David today?’, Elizabeth replying, ‘Of course not, he’s married Mrs Baldwin!’82) She was clearer in her excited response to the swimming lessons at the Bath Club in nearby Dover Street, under the tutelage of Amy Daly. In late November, a columnist calling herself ‘A Woman in London’ reported that the princesses were ‘frequently to be seen at the Club. They are making excellent progress, their instructress tells me, and by what I saw of them they both seem to be enjoying the experience immensely.’83 Sometimes their parents accompanied them. The duke marvelled at their progress; he marvelled at their lack of shyness and self-consciousness in the white-initialled blue bathing costumes that flattered Elizabeth but transformed Margaret into ‘a plump navy-blue fish’; perhaps he marvelled at their absorption.84 Anticipating the worst, he decided on a regnal name of ‘George VI’, a deliberate link with his father and more stable times.
‘Princess Elizabeth’s chance of sitting on Britain’s throne in the future is a fairly long-odds chance,’ the Sphere told readers on 22 February 1936. On 10 December, those odds unexpectedly shortened. At lunchtime the Act of Abdication received royal assent. The Duke of York succeeded his elder brother as king. On the former Edward VIII, he conferred the dukedom of Windsor. He initiated discussions of a financial settlement that swiftly became acrimonious. The ex-king departed for the Continent. His spectre loitered for years, cause of anxiety, anger and frustration to those left behind. His ire focused on a calculated omission: the new king’s refusal to grant the Duchess of Windsor royal status.
Elizabeth learned what had happened from a footman. The noise of cheering in Piccadilly, a stream of cars arriving at and leaving the house, messengers with telegrams, delivery men with bouquets and an unexpected visit from the Duchess of Kent prompted her question. She told Margaret in the nursery.
‘Does that mean that you will have to be the next queen?’ her sister responded.
‘Yes, some day.’
‘Poor you,’ said Margaret.85
From the nursery window the sisters watched the growing crowds with arms linked; the gesture was instinctive. Again and again they returned to their vantage point. By mid-afternoon, when Queen Mary visited their mother, the throng in the street below had swollen to several thousand. At each of the sisters’ appearances at the window a cheer went up.